These expressively charged studies stem from a trip that Menzel made to Italy in 1881. Rather than visit more popular destinations like Florence or Rome, the artist traveled to Verona, where he filled sketchbooks with firsthand studies of the characters and bustle of the city’s main market. Back in Berlin, Menzel used this visual repository as the basis for more elaborate drawings such as this one, made in preparation for his painting Piazza d’Erbe in Verona. The sheet is a superb example of Menzel’s mature style and his virtuosic control of the pencil, with which he was able to alternate fluently between broad, dynamic contour and refined details, confidently smudging the soft graphite to establish finely graded shadows.

In 1844, several thousand weavers in the central European region of Silesia revolted against exploitative working conditions and decreasing wages. Kollwitz’s Weavers’ Revolt, a series of six prints completed in 1897, draws on these historic events but places them in a contemporary context. A preparatory study for the final image in the series, this drawing depicts the tragic consequences of the unrest. At left, men carry a corpse into a dark parlor, to be laid down next to the two dead bodies already there; a woman sits beside them, grieving. Although the revolt itself is left out of the image, the white gunpowder haze, which drifts into the interior space through the broken window, suggests that the fighting is ongoing.

Between 1888, when she began her art studies in Munich, and her death in 1945, Kollwitz made scores of self-portraits in which she interrogated her appearance and her state of mind in a direct and uncompromising way. Although the deep rings surrounding her eyes and the gray hair can be interpreted as signs of aging, the artist was only forty-four years old when she made this work. The likeness is rendered predominantly in black chalk, with touches of violet accentuating her cheekbones and forehead. Covered in dense hatching, the left side of the artist’s face dissolves into the darkness and merges with the rapidly sketched background.

Klimt’s portrait of a young woman in strict profile is striking for both its economy of means and stark visual contrasts. The artist mostly eschewed modeling, delineating the young woman’s features with concise contours. He first drew the nude figure before adding the more abstractly rendered dress, under which the lighter, initial graphite lines can still be seen. Klimt retraced and reinforced the young woman’s chin and neck with a more incisive line set against hatching in the negative space, placing her face in sharper relief. The artist also exploited the juxtaposition of darker graphite with the white of the sheet to brilliant effect, accentuating the form of her lips, lowered eyelid, and arched eyebrow.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s expressive study captures the deep concentration of a musician at work. The drawing was made during an informal performance by Misia Natanson, a talented pianist and patron of the arts. Toulouse-Lautrec depicted Natanson on several occasions in different media, including a painted portrait that the artist named after Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ruins of Athens. In her autobiography, Natanson recalled that Toulouse- Lautrec “had fallen in love with Beethoven’s musical piece. I had to play it for him constantly because he claimed to draw his inspiration from it.”

In 1926, Mondrian was asked to design the interior of the Damenzimmer (ladies’ salon) in the house of the Dresden art collector Ida Bienert, a driving force for modernism in the city. Although the commission was never realized, the artist’s visionary design is preserved in this master plan, which combines the floor layout, wall sections, and ceiling view. To produce the plan, Mondrian extended the principles of Neo-Plasticism—an aesthetic theory that eschewed naturalistic representation in favor of straight lines, rectangular shapes, and primary colors—into the three-dimensional interior space. The resultant design is composed of clearly outlined and meticulously arranged fields of color. Mondrian attached great importance to the furnishings of the room, which were incorporated into the plan and strongly stylized.

Between 1930 and 1937, Glöckner produced more than 150 panels known collectively as his “Tafelwerk.” Made on a stiff board composed of layers of cardboard repeatedly dipped in a hot glue solution, these sturdy, double-sided works can be understood as sculptural objects. While the artist was aware of the contemporary Constructivist movement, he worked in Dresden largely in isolation and developed his compositions independently. This panel was made toward the beginning of this intensely creative period. Glöckner implemented a systematic compositional approach, manipulating his geometric shapes so that corresponding fields of color on the recto and verso have the same surface area.

A leading figure among the Austrian artists of his generation, Kokoschka rejected the idealized academic approach to the female body in favor of capturing the uninhibited poses and expressive movements of his models. In this early work, the sparse, angular quality of the artist’s line emphasizes the contorted pose of the standing girl. She is portrayed with her eyes closed and her head turned over her left shoulder, bending and flexing her outsize fingers. Her kneeling companion fastens the standing girl’s skirt, gazing toward but not directly at the viewer. The intimate, introspective atmosphere that permeates this sheet connects it with drawings and prints that Kokoschka was making for the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshops) at this time.

During the era of Nazi rule, Mueller was proclaimed to be a “degenerate” artist, and many works by him were removed from German art institutions. Acquired by the Kupferstich-Kabinett shortly after the end of World War II, this drawing attests to the museum’s attempt to fill in the gaps that had opened in its collection as a result of the Nazi seizures. The vividly colored work depicts three female bathers in a verdant landscape, rendered in Mueller’s intentionally schematic and two-dimensional style. It exemplifies the artist’s lifelong interest in idyllic pastoral settings, where the perfect unity of humanity and nature could be achieved.

In contrast to his friend Otto Mueller, who often portrayed female nudes in arcadian landscapes (as in the drawing on view nearby), Kirchner placed two bathers within the distinctly urban setting of an artist’s studio. At the center of the sheet, a model washes herself in a small flat-bottomed tub. At left, a turbaned figure drapes a towel around the shoulders of the second woman, who appears to have just stepped out of the bath. Angular lines and broken contours are surprisingly effective in describing the sensual physicality of Kirchner’s models. The hastily drawn object on a pedestal at right can be identified as Dancer with Necklace—a small wooden sculpture that the artist completed around the time this drawing was made.

In this drawing, Dix portrays himself as a modern dandy in the middle of a bustling nightclub or brothel. His likeness is elegant and self-confident, with his brow furrowed and arms akimbo. A fashionably dressed couple dances behind him at left; at right, a jazz musician plays at a drum set. The complex image depicts the thrills and temptations of metropolitan life in the Weimar Republic shortly after World War I. The work’s title announces Dix’s departure from conventional aesthetic ideals, positioning his personal vision of beauty somewhere between the grotesque and the classical. The drawing served as a preparatory study for a large-scale oil painting now in the collection of the Von der Heydt-Museum in Wuppertal, Germany.

When World War I broke out in 1914, Dix voluntarily joined the German army as a machine gunner, fighting on both the eastern and western fronts. In works produced during the 1920s, the artist grappled with his wartime experiences and, in his own words, aimed to “depict the war objectively, without trying to arouse pity, without all the propaganda.” This sheet portrays two veterans in uniform with severe facial injuries inflicted by artillery shells. Rendered in watercolor washes that are almost disturbing in their vibrancy—from blue-purple bruises covering the soldiers’ faces to yellow and red scabs forming over their wounds—it emphasizes the immense human suffering resulting from military conflict.